Josiah Lee Auspitz

The Wasp Leaves the Bottle:
Charles Sanders Peirce

Originally published in The American Scholar, vol.63,
No. 4, Autumn, 1994, pp. 602-618. The present version is a digital copy of the original, and it appears here with the permission of the author. The page numbers of the original are interpolated into the present version at the appropriate location (enclosed in brackets) to make uniformity in scholarly reference possible.
If you wish to quote from or refer to this version of the
paper in a scholarly context please use its URL address, which is located at the bottom of the present web page.

[602]

In 1983, a review of the first
two volumes of the new chronological edition of the Peirce papers
noted that at Peirce's alma mater, Harvard, his name had appeared
in the catalogue of philosophy courses only once in the previous
five years, buried in fine print with the usual clutch of "American
pragmatists." During the same period, two courses a year
were usually devoted to the work of Wittgenstein, early and late.

In the intervening decade,
the canon has changed little with respect to Wittgenstein, who
in 1993 shared with Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel the distinction
of being twice featured in the titles of Harvard philosophy courses.
But Peirce is inching up. And when his name, too, at last breaks
into the bold print of American university course catalogues,
that outcome will owe much to the long-term institutional support
evident in the volumes and series listed at the end of this essay.

Three of the books contain
selections that introduce Peirce to serious students of philosophy
(joining similar anthologies published in the past decade in German,
Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish). Another
three are scholarly editions of Peirce's writings, by theme and
chronology. Five more collect by topic some of the three hundred
essays from the 1989 Peirce Sesquicentennial Congress, at which
world-renowned professors lent their luster to the devoted scholars
who, working in unfashionable places, have been the mainstay of
the Peirce revival. Finally, there are three secondary works of
more general interest -- the first full-length biography, a recent
paperback edition of the best introductory survey, and a collection
of historical essays setting Peirce in his nineteenth-century
context -- and a selection of six monographs from the more than
forty booklength titles of the past seven years.

In all, the expanding bookshelf
gives evidence that Peircean studies have completed an important
decade in a growing movement of rediscovery. Taken together, the
materials go far to establish Charles Sanders Peirce as the classic
American philosopher -- a difficult, ranging, and rigorous philosophical
mind, as important as any that the English-speaking world has
produced.

The point, moreover, at which
Peirce diverges radically from the more celebrated Wittgenstein
may now be working to Peirce's advantage. Wittgenstein posed the
issue in the opening pages of his Blue Book,
a collection of his lecture notes from the early 1930s. Here he
departed from his usually restrained style to disparage the "craving
for generality" that, as he saw it, had led philosophy astray.
His disdain set a cleansing tone of scrupulous modesty in an age
of ideological excess. It seemed to his followers to be vindicated
in a new departure -- the case method, focused not on metaphysical
isms but on the minutious examination of both ordinary language
and the "language games" that shape experience:

If we say thinking is essentially
operating with signs, the first question you might ask is: "What
are signs?"-- Instead of giving any kind of general
answer to this question, I shall propose to you to look closely
at particular cases which we should call "operating
with signs." (My italics)

[603]

Peirce, by contrast, tackled
the question "What are signs?" head on, not because
he was less fastidious than Wittgenstein in his craving for generality,
but because his was a mind of greater speculative power. More
rigorously trained than Wittgenstein as both mathematician and
experimental scientist, and incomparably better read in the history
of logic and philosophy, Peirce saw the case method as posing
a problem for signs in general.

To recognize something as
a case, an instance, always raised the question "a case of
what?" As Peirce saw it, any sign can be viewed simultaneously
in both general and particular aspects. His distinction between
"token" and "type" went to the heart of the
problem. (The young Cambridge logician F. P. Ramsey had in fact
commended it to Wittgenstein in a 1923 review of the Tractatus).
A mark on a piece of paper may be viewed both as a physical inscription
(and as such a particular instance or "token") and as
a representation of more general attributes shared by any inscription
of that "type." Further, the token-type distinction,
now canonical among logicians, is but a partial rendering of one
of many triadic divisions in a ramified theory of signs that Peirce
developed from the mid-1860s until his death in 1914.

For Peirce actual signs are
never univocal. It is in their general character that they may
be construed variably and analyzed modally. Of Peirce's own divisions,
icon-index-symbol is the most commonly used. Santayana took it
up the moment he heard Peirce expound it, and the linguist Roman
Jakobson, when he came upon it in late career, saw it as opening
"new, urgent and far-reaching vistas to the science of language."
In a computer age we are quick to see it as a modal classification
with no pure referents in everyday experience.

Thus, as a portrait, Gainsborough's
"Blue Boy" is an "icon," a self-sufficient
sign that represents its object by resemblance. But we can also
view it as an "index," pointing to something beyond
itself that can be confirmed with collateral evidence, as when
a physician sees in the pallor of Blue Boy's skin evidence that
Gainsborough's model suffered from a nutritional deficiency. Or
we might take it as a "symbol" -- of youth, of British
eighteenth century portraiture, of the spirit of an age, or any
other generality it may represent by convention or habit of association.
And since the various modal classes need not exclude each other,
a symbol may be further analyzed under the token-type distinction
(a sign modality which is both symbol and token being in Peirce's
lexicon a "replica").

Icon-index-symbol, tone-token-type,
and the five dozen other Peircean classificatory terms are not
grammatical or linguistic groupings but elements in a table of
the modalities of signification. They are markers in a continuum
of "semeiosis" (Peirce's punctilious transliteration
of the Greek for what Wittgenstein called "operating with
signs," or Zeichenhandeln.)

Peirce's categories proceed
from a formal, three-way view of the semiotic relationship, in
which a "sign" mediates between an "object"
and an "interpretant," the interpreting effect that
the sign produces upon, for example, a human mind. In exploring
the myriad relations and gradations among these three correlates,
Peirce's modalities make of every sign-event a moment pregnant
with infinite possibility.

In so doing, they permit
a more widely ranging phenomenology than that limited to the givens
of actual experience. As constructs, they are judged not by the
correspondence of each modality to some particular fact or utterance
but by the explanatory power of the theory of signs as a whole.
Like the elements of the periodic table, Peirce's sign-modalities
occur in experience mainly in combination. And, like the periodic
table, they are meant to cover every possible compound. One of
their advantages over natural language is that they can account
for sciences of discovery. Because they are not limited to what
exists, they are able, at least in principle, to accommodate whatever
might be. And by including modal terms to explain, criticize,
and justify the persistence of commonsense ideas, the Peircean
system both encourages flexibility and guards against a merely
frivolous deconstruction of experience.

Peirce, one of the founders
of modern symbolic logic, thus introduces into the philosophy
of language the premeditated artificiality that constitutes at
once the power and limitation of modern science. Science leaps
out of common sense into a rigorously defined language that it
uses to model aspects of experience. Peirce pursues this habit
to a philosophically conscious and self-critical level.

As Hegel, relatively early
in the develop[604]ment of modern historiography, produced a philosophy
that took wing from historical consciousness, Peirce, at the first
stirrings of the American research university, became the philosopher
par excellence to bring the reality posited by modern science
to the point of reunion with experience as a whole.

Whether we wish, as protagonists,
to give the fullest play to a scientific worldview or, as critical
philosophers, to understand its conditionality, Peirce's work
as a whole -- independent of its still unexhausted technical achievements
-- is an indispensable port of call. And because he was profoundly
learned in ancient and medieval logic, Peirce gives us a philosophy
in the grand tradition, one that is genuinely post- rather than
anti-Aristotelian.

Whence the headnote of Joseph
Brent's pioneering biography, taken from one of Peirce's portentously
self-referential manuscript pages:

[I intend] to make a philosophy
like that of Aristotle, that is to say, to outline a theory so
comprehensive that, for a long time to come, the entire work of
human reason, in philosophy of every school and kind, in mathematics,
in psychology, in physical science, in history, in sociology,
and in whatever other department there may be, shall appear as
the filling up of its details.

Brent's narrative leans heavily
on such direct quotations from unpublished manuscripts and epistolary
material, so that one can appreciate that Brent's work was seriously
retarded by the refusal of the Harvard Philosophy Department circa
1958 to grant him access to four boxes of Peirce family letters.
When he gained knowledge of some of the contents from other archival
sources -- and quoted from them in a 1960 doctoral dissertation
in history at UCLA -- he incurred, as he reports it, the wrath
of Harvard. He believes that this hostility more than any professional
judgment on the quality of his work accounted for the failure
of academic presses to publish his dissertation in the 1960s.

Happily, Brent's preface
reports that in 1989 Indiana University Press paid him a small
advance to bring up to date and reconsider the doctoral work of
thirty years before. Without incident, Harvard gave permission
to quote from its full collection, and the shroud of secrecy surrounding
Peirce's personal life, maintained by surviving relatives as well
as a decorous Harvard department, was officially broken.

The family archive does in
fact contain dirt on Peirce, but the real scandal is more institutional
than personal. It lies in the conduct of scientific rivals, who
seized upon Peirce's weaknesses to deny him preferment, employment,
and grants. Brent documents what others have also observed: that
after the death of Peirce's main patron, his father Benjamin Peirce,
Jr., a group closed in upon him; the movement was orchestrated
at crucial junctures by Simon Newcomb, the noted astronomer who
succeeded Peirce's father as the most influential American scientist
of his generation. Such eminences as the university presidents
Eliot of Harvard, Gilman of Johns Hopkins, and Butler of Columbia
were among Charles Peirce's leading detractors. Though they sometimes
claimed to be protecting innocent students from Peirce's allegedly
baneful moral influence, they also took care to deny him opportunities
for guest lectures and pure research that involved no student
contact.

Peirce's family and publishing
connections, his admitted brilliance, and his own and his wife's
inherited income, until they lost it in the crash of 1893, were
such that he could not be eliminated entirely from the intellectual
scene. His supporters included William James, Josiah Royce, John
Dewey, a few loyal students he had inspired in his four years
at Johns Hopkins, some college classmates, and several important
editors, officials, publishers, and men of means: Garrison of
the Nation, Carus of the Monist, Cattell of Popular Science Monthly,
Baldwin of the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, Smith
of the Century Dictionary, Langley of the Smithsonian, the publishers
Putnam and Plimpton, the millionaires Pinchot and Morrison.

These admirers often came
through in a pinch with a writing commission, a few lectures,
a loan, or a direct subsidy. Charles's elder brother James Mills
Peirce, a Harvard mathematics professor and dean of the graduate
school, intervened to straighten out his financial affairs, and
his younger brother Herbert, a career diplomat, used his Washington
connections as well as those of Senator (and cousin) Henry Cabot
Lodge on Charles's behalf.

But in the small university
world of his day, [605] Peirce's enemies controlled the heights.
When Peirce was forty-five, Daniel C. Gilman abruptly dismissed
him from Johns Hopkins upon receiving testimony that Peirce had
lived with his second wife before the completion of the legal
divorce from his first. After that Peirce was repeatedly blackballed
from further university positions. When, in his mid-fifties, he
began to reach, as philosophers often do, the full range of his
powers, there was no institution to underwrite him, no body of
students to take direct guidance from him.

Peirce's most enraging flaw
was that he often seemed not to care. He was dedicated to making
his mind a vessel through which reality might shine, and this
gave him a childlike insouciance that was both a provocation and
an easy target for academics bent on the more mundane aspects
of their calling.

Charles had been raised in
a hothouse environment in which intellectual excellence was prized
above all else. His father, aunt, uncles, and family friends led
lives largely devoted to science and mathematics. The elder Peirce
was so completely concentrated upon intellectual achievement that,
in the midst of the Civil War, he condoned slavery if used, as
in ancient Greece, to free an elite for scientific inquiry. He
began training his son early in mathematical games and in discrimination
among the senses. When Charles was eleven he wrote "A History
of Chemistry." At sixteen, father and son began regular readings
in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason; at eighteen
Charles worked with his father's sister on an English translation
of the section on the Transcendental Analytic.

Both at Harvard and nationally,
the Peirce circle was at the center of a movement dedicated to
the proposition that intellectual excellence alone should determine
appointments to scientific and scholarly positions. This meritocratic
view, always of limited appeal, reflected a devotion to inquiry
that became the guiding principle of Charles Peirce's life. It
explains both the singleness of purpose and the resilience that
enabled him to surmount many tribulations.

In charting Peirce's troubles,
Brent does not flinch from the lugubrious or the sensational.
He documents the facial neuralgia that caused Peirce excruciating
physical pain for most of his life, the resulting addiction to
narcotics, the violent outbursts, the periods of near madness,
the (hetero-) sexual excesses, the financial crises, the petty
mendacities and thefts. On slimmer evidence, Brent speculates
on Peirce as a wife beater and on the earlier career of Peirce's
second wife, Juliette, as a French courtesan. And, on Peirce's
authority, he presents the philosopher's left-handedness as a
disability comparable to neuralgia (Peirce attributed the incomprehensibility
of his work to his "left-brained," diagrammatic way
of thinking).

Brent is at his archival
best, however, in tracing the bureaucratic proceedings that resulted
in Peirce being severed from Johns Hopkins, ousted from the Coast
and Geodetic Survey, and finally, denied an early Carnegie grant
despite the support of the president of the United States, the
secretary of war, a raft of the leading philosophers and editors,
and Andrew Carnegie himself. At almost every turn Brent shows
how Peirce's self-absorption and consequent obtuseness to his
effect on others conspired to undercut his own cause.

As a consolation, Peirce,
at age sixty-four, received the honor from the Harvard Corporation
of allowing private funds raised by William James to be passed
through it to pay him for a series of lectures -- his one fleeting
academic berth in all the years after the Johns Hopkins dismissal.
The talks were given in Sever Hall, which stands on the site of
the house where Peirce grew up (a bronze plaque noting this fact
now graces the entry of the building).

Ever proving himself beholden
to no one, Peirce opened the lectures with what must have appeared
as chaffingly condescending remarks about the lively but mistaken
pragmatism of William James, his most reliable friend and benefactor,
who had generously credited Peirce with originating the philosophical
doctrine. Peirce saw Jamesian pragmatism as exaggerating practicality
into a metaphysical doctrine parading as an anti-metaphysics.
(James, as Peirce saw it, took practical effect as a criterion
of truth rather than as a razor for clarifying meaning, and Peirce
would soon rename his own view "pragmaticism," the better
to distinguish it from that of James.)

James reacted by firing off
an uncharacteristically furious letter, not quoted by Brent, calling
Peirce "a monster of desultory intellect . . . without even
any intellectual residuum from his work that can be called a finished
construction, only 'suggestions' and a begging old [606] age."
James subsequently discouraged publication of the Sever Hall lectures,
but continued to stand by Peirce financially, raising a fund that
assisted him in the mendicant, unusually productive final decade
of his life.

In assessing Peirce as a
philosopher, Brent has profited from the thirty years since his
dissertation. Not only has the accumulating opinion on Peirce's
philosophy helped to enrich the accepted view of it, but Brent
modifies his earlier, callow thesis of a direct relation between
Peirce's temperament and the allegedly failed architectonic of
the Peircean system. Instead, he gives us, in his final chapter,
a moving gloss on Peirce's own description of himself as a 'wasp
in a bottle," buzzing furiously in a glass cage formed by
his own self-conception and the reaction of others to it.

Brent portrays Peirce as
spurred by the ruins of his private life and scholarly career
to a contrite, peculiarly scientific piety, in which the theoretical
gift of hypothesis becomes man's best stab at entering into the
mind of God. Brent argues also that the philosopher's belated
attempt at a "moral reconstruction of pragmatism" should
be read as a "direct result of Peirce's recognition of his
own folly and the remorse consequent upon it."

A single-volume biography
has understandable difficulty doing justice to Peirce's philosophical
development. For this, one turns to the Peircean corpus itself
and to the expanding literature of re-engagement with it. Notwithstanding
Peirce's fame as a neglected genius, his work has always commanded
the attention of serious thinkers. It can be argued that recognition
of his importance has been retarded because major writers have
been moved by his work to pursue, not a full and fair understanding
of Peirce, but ambitious and sometimes original lines of their
own.

Peirce's papers, certainly,
have not wanted for distinguished editors. At his death in 1914,
the manuscript materials not previously published were enough
to fill seventy-five 500-page volumes of the sort now produced
by Indiana University Press. Harvard paid his widow $250 for the
lot. Josiah Royce took charge of the editing in the two years
before his own death in 1916. In the early 1920s, the editorial
task passed to Charles Irving Lewis, who had been brought to Harvard
partly for this purpose after his Surveyof
Symbolic Logic (1918) proclaimed Peirce's contribution, on
the basis of the published materials alone, to have been "the
most considerable of any up to his time, with the doubtful exception
of Boole."

Lewis spent two years immersed
in the manuscripts and wrote an editorial plan before giving the
project up to pursue his own work in modal logic. In the 1920s
the fundraising efforts of a student of James and Royce, Morris
Raphael Cohen of the City College of New York, enabled Harvard
to employ as editors two junior faculty members Charles Hartshorne
and Paul Weiss, who were themselves to become important professors
of philosophy.

Their first volume, published
in 1931, cast Peirce's work into a mold for philosophy propounded
by Alfred North Whitehead in his Gifford Lectures of 1926-27 (published
as Process and Reality in 1929), in which a philosophical
system was seen as generated recursively by a few fundamental
metaphysical categories. Peirce seemed to fit this model precisely.
From his triadic divisions of signs to his metaphysical categories
of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, triadicity recurred throughout
his writings. To lay bare the architectonic of his philosophy,
the editors began their collection with a volume devoted to Peirce's
writings on the categories, without regard to chronology, to suggest
that all else was generated from them. By 1935 Harvard University
Press had issued the first six volumes of an eventual eight-volume
Collected Papers, organized thematically.

The Hartshorne-Weiss edition
revolutionized the accepted view of Peirce. Previous to it even
Peirce's staunchest admirers considered his work fragmentary and
undeveloped. The "tragedy" of Peirce was thought to
be that his erratic temperament and unfavorable circumstances
had conspired to deprive the world of any connected piece of his
reasoning. Even Cohen, who had compiled the first Peirce bibliography
(1916) and had edited a well-selected anthology of a dozen of
Peirce's published essays (1923), had placed him among the lonely
pioneers of philosophy whose main influence was in the fruitful
suggestions they gave to others.

The Harvard Collected
Papers, by contrast, established Peirce as the author
of a major philosophical system. But it also set him up for a
fall. It seemed to have him claiming too much. [608] A wave of
contrarian scholarship arose showing the Peircean "system"
to be quaint, or failed, or no single system at all but two incipient
systems in conflict with each other, or a series of three or four
of them each developing out of the collapse of the previous one.
The author of the most thorough and influential of these critical
works merely reflected academic common sense circa 1965 when he
wrote, in the first issue of the quarterly Transactions of
the Charles S. Peirce Society, that "so much of Peirce's
writing is so bizarre that the reader clings for dear life to
those few doctrines which, like pragmatism, have an aura of reasonableness
about them."

It was not until 1958, with
the publication of the seventh and eighth volumes of the Collected
Papers, edited by Arthur W. Burks and underwritten
by the Rockefeller Foundation, that the scholarly apparatus to
the Harvard edition included a partial chronology enabling readers
to date the various excerpts. And it was not until 1967 that Richard
S. Robin's annotated catalogue of the Harvard manuscript materials
was published. (The editorial introduction to the recent electronic
edition of the Collected Papers recommends using its search
features in conjunction with the Burks and Robin bibliographies
to undo the "artificial dismemberment of the Peircean corpus"
in the topical arrangement of the original editors.)

In 1973 increasing dissatisfaction
with the captious cast of the secondary literature led a group
of scholars from the Charles S. Peirce Society to call for a more
comprehensive, critical edition of his work, chronologically arranged.
Under Edward C. Moore, the founding director of the Peirce Edition
Project, funds were raised from the National Science Foundation,
the National Endowment for the Humanities, and (in a remarkable
gesture for an out-of-state writer by a local elected body) the
Indiana State Legislature. Work on the chronological edition began
in 1975 on the Indianapolis campus of Indiana and Purdue universities.
It took a team of scholars six years to decipher, date, collate,
transcribe, select, verify, emend, and annotate manuscripts before
the first critically edited volume was ready for press. After
eighteen years, the fifth volume, just out, takes Peirce's writings
only through the aftermath of the Johns Hopkins period.

To hasten the dissemination
of the post-Hopkins materials -- a selection
of which is now projected at twenty-five further volumes -- photocopies
of the full collection of dated manuscripts were early made available
in open file cabinets both at the Peirce Edition Project and at
the Center for the Study of Pragmaticism at Texas Tech University
in Lubbock. Both the Indiana and Texas centers have other research
aids that attract international visitors. The directors of both
have actively promoted a range of research and study materials
(most recently, The Essential Peirce, two volumes edited
for convenient classroom and scholarly use by the current and
past directors of the Peirce Edition Project, Nathan Houser and
Christian Kloesel). As a result, the chronological edition has
already given rise to a new wave of scholarship on Peirce's development.

The doyen of this scholarly
movement is Max H. Fisch, whose first contribution to the Peirce
literature came in 1939. Named by the Harvard Philosophy Department
in 1959 as the official biographer, Fisch set about methodically
to collect all relevant archival materials. Beginning with Brent's
contribution of his extensive dissertation notes, scholars added
to the "Fisch Notes" -- a twenty-thousand-card collation
of Peirce materials from numerous family and governmental archives
-- which were made more widely available at the Indianapolis and
Lubbock centers. In addition, Fisch assembled forty-nine file
drawers of scholarly correspondence and offprints on Peirce and
an extensive personal library, which now forms the basis of more
than seven hundred linear feet of bookshelves lining the walls
of the Peirce Edition Project. As Fisch proceeded, he issued strategically
placed articles that illuminated aspects of Peirce's thought and
milieu. His services to other scholars, however, impeded his own
progress on a biography. A punctilious correspondent, he was also
known (as this writer can testify) to open his office, his files,
and his home for weeks at a time to visiting researchers.

When Fisch's advancing years
(he is now ninety-four) put a biography beyond his grasp, the
directors of the Indiana and Texas centers, Christian Kloesel and
Kenneth Laine Ketner, performed the filial act of collecting most
of his important writings on Peirce under the title Peirce,
Semeiotic and Pragmatism.

A careful scholar, Fisch nevertheless
had a [609] bold thesis on the origins of Peirce's pragmatism.
Though Peirce was almost wholly preoccupied with science and logic,
Fisch early suggested that the origins and implications of Peirce's
philosophy were social. In this he followed an insight from Vico,
who in Fisch's translation of him presents even logical relations
as reflections upon institutionally dominant habits of thought.
In an essay not reprinted in the collection, Fisch sees philosophy
itself as emerging from the "critique of institutions."

For Peirce's pragmatism the
institutional and social origins are, Fisch argued, bound up with
law. Peirce and James both traced the doctrine to the early 1870s
in the meetings of the Cambridge Metaphysical Club. Of the six
most active club members, three were lawyers. Whereas James credited
Peirce with pragmatism, Peirce himself cited Nicholas St. John
Green, among the founding group of professors of the Harvard Law
School, as the "grandfather of pragmatism."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,
in his time the leading American writer on jurisprudence, was
another of the active lawyers in the Cambridge Metaphysical Club,
and Fisch saw in Holmes's youthful "prediction theory of
law" the first application of pragmatism to the social sphere.
Holmes's prediction theory defined law as what the legal system
could be expected to enforce after whim and idiosyncrasy were
winnowed out by successive review. This fit the pragmatic maxim
as Peirce would later expound it, first in French and then in
carefully convoluted English phrasing: "Consider what effects,
which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the
object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these
effects is the whole of our conception of the object."

Notwithstanding Holmes's
antipathy to Peirce's speculative tendencies, Fisch suggested
in the 1942 article that opens his collected essays that a Peircean
recasting of Holmes might supply a more systematic logical ground
than Holmes himself could muster.

Fifty years later, in the
midst of a self-described pragmatic movement in American law schools,
few have taken up Fisch's suggestion. Among the lawyers, an attempt
to fashion a Wittgensteinian pragmatism (for which Richard Rorty
rather than Wittgenstein would appear to be the philosophical
mentor) may have delayed a grasp of Peirce's thought. The adage
attributed to Wittgenstein that "meaning is use" is
often misread as a pithy substitute for Peirce's original pragmatic
maxim.

The original of Wittgenstein's
remark, however, is neither pithy nor pragmatic. The words "meaning
. . . is . . . use" are extracted from a much longer sentence
that Wittgenstein characteristically limits to "a large class
of cases -- though not for all -- in which we use the word 'meaning.'"
The abridgment encourages a merely empirical inquiry into the
practices of identifiable communities of interpreters. Peirce's
pragmatic maxim, by contrast, is cast in a bolder spirit. It identifies
meaning with conceivable practical bearings, independent of actual
usage. It thus extends the community of interpreters hypothetically
and indefinitely into all conceivable futures.

Peirce's maxim is intended
to make a place for the imaginative element in science -- hypothesis,
the hallmark of what he called the method of abduction. Transposed
into legal thought it would emphasize the vision that distinguishes
disciplined jurisprudential reasoning from that of the pedestrian
practitioner.

On a factual standard of
use, Holmes's prediction theory of law could be maintained without
much discernment. It would merely assert -- as in fact Holmes
did assert -- the doctrine that law is what those in authority
can reasonably be expected to do when on good behavior. It would
seek the ultimate locus of law in current professional canons,
a quest with understandable appeal in the law schools. By contrast,
if pragmatic meaning extends to conceivability, the circle of
interpretation will be more open. A prediction theory of law must
then take into account a range of conjectured futures, many of
which may not accord with the profession's conventional norms.
The theory might then lead -- as Holmes was indeed led -- to a
supplementary doctrine of judicial restraint founded in the fallibility
of the legal profession.

A Peircean pragmatism thus
shifts emphasis from the actual to the potential; by adding a
greater burden of foresight, it anticipates Holmes's more mature
jurisprudence. Which is what Fisch meant to suggest: that a Peircean
standpoint helps to make explicit the underlying coherence in
Holmes's thought in a way that eluded Holmes himself and that
provides a logical basis for a reconstructed legal pragmatism.

[610]

To repeat: Peirce's motive
in providing explicitly for the free, forward play of mind was
to give prominence to hypothesis in scientific discovery. Instead
of stifling the bold, speculative leap, Peirce wished to find
ways to encourage and discipline it. He did so out of a faith
in the human capacity to guess correctly. As he saw it, the progress
of science testified to a reality present in both the human mind
and the order of the universe. Science did not proceed merely
in small inductive increments but in imaginative theorizing in
which our use of signs in their general aspects enabled us to
participate in a natural order that was itself evolving toward
greater generality.

If, then, as Fisch would
have it, philosophy is rooted in the critique of institutions,
the relevant institution for Peirce's philosophy as a whole is
modern science. Indeed, Peirce may be profitably read in terms
of a double burden he placed upon himself: creating a logic for
science that would also embody, through philosophical critique,
the self-restraint appropriate to the limits of science as an
institution.

Recent thematic collections
and secondary literature give prominence both to this dual theme
and to Peirce's success in transcending it. There is, indeed,
a growing scholarly consensus that Peirce advances the logic of
scientific inquiry in the context of a broader philosophical criterion
applicable elsewhere.

The extent of Peirce's immersion
in the science of his day is evident in his reviews in the
Nation, collected and indexed in four volumes by Kenneth
Laine Ketner, and in his papers, grant applications, and publishers'
prospectuses in the history and practice of science, collected
by Carolyn Eisele, herself a pioneering scholar on Peirce's work
in science and mathematics. Peirce often earned his daily bread
with such writings, or at least tried to. They show him learned
in the history of science, alert to new discoveries and trends,
and remarkably prescient about fruitful lines of inquiry.

His more popular articles
throw a few "sops to Cerberus," as he called the inevitable
compromises in making theoretical issues accessible. Yet, since
they were at times his only public medium, they often broach his
most difficult ideas in deceptively fluent and abbreviated form.
Viewed against the background of what Peirce was writing in his
notebooks and suffering in his life, even a minor book notice
may serve as a running commentary on central issues that engaged
him. Especially poignant is his preoccupation with the honors
and material support conducive to the flowering of scientific
genius.

The thematic collections
have encouraged an increasingly respectful treatment of Peirce's
main work in logical semiotic and philosophy. Instead of trying
to trip him up in inconsistencies and reversals, scholars are
now wont to fasten on a powerful core of interrelated conceptions
that provide a standard for both assessing his development and
explaining his uncanny relevance across a variety of philosophical
schools and academic disciplines.

Whether one approaches Peirce
through scientific method, the pragmatic maxim, the theory of
signs, his view of continuity, his work on the categories, his
concepts of evolution and chance, his notions of God and love,
or his logic of relations, one soon finds that each topic involves
the others in a complex of ideas that he integrated with increasing
mastery as he grew older.

Several new guides to this
development are now available, each with some distinctive emphasis.
Christopher Hookway's Peirce (1985), recently
reissued in paperback in the Arguments of the Philosophers series,
has the advantage over most of the earlier surveys of following
Peirce on his own terms. Though alive with interstitial criticism,
it does not try to impose an overarching structure or thesis upon
him. Its leitmotif is Peirce's attention to traditional philosophical
questions and his determination to supersede Kant. C. F. Delaney's
Science, Knowledge,
and Mind addresses
Peirce's philosophy of science, using Descartes as his foil and
limiting the number of concepts treated in the interest of brevity
and readability. Carl R. Hausman's Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary
Philosophy stresses the architectonic character of
Peirce's thought. By informing a reading of the early writings
with the later, more speculative work, it develops a coherent
view of Peirce's project, which it compares favorably with the
best current academic work.

There is also an expanding
monographic literature that reconstructs aspects of Peirce for
contemporary use. In this technical realm, the strongest claims
for Peirce are often the most narrowly couched. A prime example
is Robert W. Burch's A Peircean Reduction Thesis: The Foundations
of Topological Logic, which attempts in ten chapters
an algebraic reconstruction of [611] Peirce's logic. Burch sets
his terms to prove a thesis central to Peirce's thought: that
all logical relations of more than three elements are reducible
to triadic relations, but that triadic relations are not reducible
to dyads and monads. As Peirce liked to point out, our everyday
language, by distinguishing between direct and indirect objects,
has a version of this logical insight built into its grammar.
"John gives Mary a book" cannot be reduced to the three
dyads John gives/Mary, John gives/book, and Mary/book, whereas
the four elements in "John gives Mary a book and a candle"
are reducible into two three-element sentences without loss of
logical content.

In the course of his demonstration,
Burch argues (chapter 7) that all dyadic and monadic relations
are expressible in a triadically grounded form, and (chapter 8)
that the entire body of quantificational logic, which rests on
a dyadic notion of identity, can be translated into a neo-Peircean
system. In other words, triadic logics are richer than dyadic
ones (though precisely how much richer is by no means settled,
and several papers in Studies in the Logic of Charles Peirce
begin to address the technical issues).

In an eleventh, non-algebraic
chapter, Burch presents some of the fruits of his construction
in graphs. He takes his cue from Peirce's own graphical systems
of notation, as explicated by Don D. Roberts, J. Jay Zeman, and
others. He compares Peirce's achievement in combining topology
and logic -- in effect, freeing logic from an algebraic notation
based on movable type -- with Descartes's melding of algebra and
geometry in the analytic geometry. Burch's reconstruction is so
much more perspicuously expressed in a few diagrams as to persuade
one that topology is indeed the natural medium for Peirce's logic
of relations, and that the heuristic test will come not with further
algebraic work but with computer-graphic and other imaging aids.

The implications of Burch's
argument are far-reaching. Peirce's core example of a purely triadic
relation comes from semiosis, which relates object, sign, and
interpretant. Peirce's approach differs from that of Saussure,
the other pioneer of modern semiotic, who proposed a two-pronged
view connecting the signifier and the signified. Burch's argument
could be extended to suggest that Peircean semiotic swallows up
the rival school.

The same point prompts a
reconsideration of work done in Peirce's own name. Many who accept
Peirce's triadic view of the sign divide the analysis of it into
three dyadically organized subfields: semantics (studying relations
of sign and object), syntactics (studying relations of signs to
each other), and pragmatics (studying relations of signs to their
interpretants). Charles Morris, an American follower of Tarski
and the Vienna Circle who established this terminology in the
1930s, traced his approach to Peirce's first (1867) paper on the
topic. John Dewey and the political scientist Arthur Bentley objected
vociferously that something essential in Peirce's project was
lost in Morris's three-way partition. Burch's proof that a triad
cannot be reduced to three dyads makes their criticism of Morris
more exact. It suggests that Peirce should be viewed not merely
as precursor and contributor to the mainstream of semiotics of
the past half century, but also as having conceived a project
of a more spacious kind.

Burch is more explicit in
drawing this very conclusion for modern logic. Previous to his
work, debate had centered on whether Peirce's reduction thesis
might have exceptions. Quine and others influenced by Tarski directed
attention to the purely algebraic issue of whether there might
be tetrads that are irreducible to triads. Burch concentrates
instead on theses of more pointedly logical consequence: he argues
that all relations of both more than and fewer than three elements
may be rendered in triadic form without loss of logical content.
He thus suggests that a three-way notion of identity ("teridentity")
is what distinguishes logic from other branches of study expressible
in mathematical form. If this is true, the achievements of twentieth-century
logic, insofar as they are philosophically neutral, can be retained
and superseded in a fully reconstructed Peircean scheme.

The issue is more than quantitative.
The tertium quid that Peirce persistently provides
for is the active role of interpreting mind. One may, as noted,
use Peirce's semiotic to analyze signs without attending to their
interpretant -- as in a purely formal semantics treating the relations
of signs to their objects. But we know in advance that, however
compelling and precise such abstraction might seem, its clarity
will be of an inferior grade. For, if meaning consists in conceivable
practical bear[613]ings, an "uninterpreted" system is
meaningless by definition, and a logic that prescinds the interpretant
from its purview will be tempted to slip in hidden assumptions
and covert interpretive judgments.

Among formal logicians (Peirce
included), one accepted solution to this and other dilemmas is
to stratify discourse, positing hierarchies of languages in which
one interprets another. Peirce's elegant alternative is to provide
for interpretation architectonically by casting logic as semiotic:
He introduces interpretation from the bottom up, at the level
of the sign-interpretant rather than only at the more inflated
stratum of a metalanguage. Instead of pretending that formal
logic and other branches of "pure" mathematics necessarily
exclude interpretants, we are encouraged to analyze the modalities
of interpretation peculiar to them. If the Peircean approach
is accepted, a great deal of highly regarded twentieth-century
work, including stock-in-trade notions that shape Burch's own
presentation, would appear more narrowly applicable than previously
thought.

A further technical topic
with profound philosophical implications is to be found in Peirce's
theory of the continuum. Peirce's father taught him the calculus
as Leibniz had originally conceived it, as a continuum of infinitesimals.
The Leibnizian view has been revised in late twentieth-century
mathematics under the label "nonstandard." Nonstandard
analysis, as well as his own work in modal logic and Cantor's
work on orders of infinity, provides Hilary Putnam with a point
of reference against which to reconstruct Peirce's view of continuity.

In the introduction to
Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conferences Lectures
of 1898 (jointly written with Kenneth Laine Ketner),
Putnam shows that if we illustrate Peirce's continuum linearly,
it can be grasped not simply as an uncountable infinity of points
along a line, but as a potential explosion of infinitesimals at
any point at which we may choose to cut the line. Or as Peirce
puts it, a point "might burst into any discrete multitude
of points whatever, and they would all have been one point before
the explosion". As Putnam is acutely aware, this is not
an isolated mathematical curiosity, but a technical way of presenting
the metaphysical concept that led Peirce to call his later philosophy
"synechism," the doctrine of continuity. Synechistic
points are conceived possibilia of infinite (infinitesimal)
breadth and depth.

When we add to Putnam's analysis
the reminder that semiosis provides Peirce with the prime case
of continuity, the radical implications of his view
are apparent. Peirce's sign relation, as we have seen, connects
object, sign, and interpretant in an irreducible triad. But since
every interpretant may also be viewed as a sign, to be registered
upon the mind with its own interpretation, the continuity of signs
will be unbroken. Moreover, since signs are open to modal analysis,
not only does every sign-interpretant lead to others but every
sign is analyzable into a multitude of modalities.

Peirce's concept of continuity,
in sum, when coupled with his view of semiosis, portrays the
universe as both endlessly unfolding and susceptible to an inexhaustible
plurality of representations, ready to "explode," as
it were, at any point we care to examine. Within this picture,
the organizing conceptions of much contemporary academic philosophy
may be accommodated and delimited. For example, Peirce's microcosmic
view of possibilia helps to situate large talk
about "possible world" in a context at once precise
and metaphysical so that, as Putnam gently puts it, the possible-worlds
theories of contemporary writers appear as a façon de
parler.

A mind as powerfully kaleidoscopic
as Peirce's is apt to neglect the contours of common experience.
Peirce portrayed himself self-deprecatingly as physiologically
prone to thus failing. He at times attributed his genius for compact
conceptions to his left-handedness, which disposed him to think
diagrammatically, at times to the unusually small size of his
brain, which limited the number of ideas he could entertain. Be
that as it may, he was not bashful about suggesting how others
might make up for his deficiencies within a structure that he
set forth. In doing so, he sometimes slipped into what he called
"triadomany," which is misconceived when it attempts
to derive substantive classifications from three-way modal distinctions.

Peirce's program for inquiry
as well as his underlying diagrammatic and triadic habits of thought
are meticulously elucidated in Beverly Kent's Charles S.
Peirce: Logic and the Classification of the Sciences.
Treating what might be re[614]garded as a dated, nineteenth-century
curiosity -- Peirce's neo-Comtean classifications of the sciences
-- Kent excavates a latticed structure reminiscent of Escher.
(In a much sketchier appendix she also compares Peirce's iconic
habits of thought to those of Einstein.) In her hands the fussy
tables of the sciences are turned into the best exposition available
of Peirce's view of the place of logic in relation to mathematics,
the positive sciences, and the several branches of philosophy.
Kent traces the shifts in classification and terminology that
reflect Peirce's approach to a fundamental dilemma: on the one
hand, Peirce portrays formal logic as a branch of pure mathematics;
on the other, he insists on the triadic and normative character
of logical semiotic as against the dyadic and non-normative character
of mathematics. It follows that formal logic as a branch of mathematics
will always fall short of representing the essential character
of logic itself. This helps us to understand why for Peirce a
logic of relations, even when expressed algebraically, must be
classified as distinct from the algebra of relations. Far from
being the passive follower of mathematical fashion, logic provides
its own, inner dynamic for mathematical innovation. As Kent is
aware, Peirce's deep admiration for Hegel's Science of Logic
-- remarkable in a pioneer of precise notation -- follows from
this underlying view of logic as always bursting the formal bounds
in which it is cast.

Classification, moreover,
raises questions central to Peirce's philosophy and, indeed, to
any theoretical project that explains the world in terms of supersensible
structures. Supposing Peirce's views of continuity and triadicity
to hold, how would they affect the conduct of inquiry? Or, more
broadly: Given a world of seamless continuity and unending possibility,
how do we go about making the meaningful distinctions that are
the stuff of science as it is practiced and of life as we live
it?

Recent monographs attempt
to show the way Peirce might address these questions on two crucial
topics: inquiry and the self. In Truth and the End of Inquiry,
C. J. Misak draws distinctions that sometimes elude latter-day
pragmatists, as well as Peirce's analytic critics. To say, as
Peirce does, that everything is relational need not mean that
"all truth is relative" or merely situational. And to
say that interpretation is integral to the sign relationship does
not eliminate meaningful distinctions between knowledge and opinion.

Though Peirce's early pragmatic
writings did not dwell upon what contemporary analytic philosophers
call a theory of truth -- he discussed most issues that concern
them under the heading of "reality" -- Misak performs
an artful reconstruction to present the Peirce of the early, academic
years as a figure who more than holds his own in contemporary
debate.

Peirce, it should be said,
had a way of putting the question that does not translate easily
into current academic parlance. He saw "reality" as
categoreally distinct from "existence." (It is significant
that in a famous essay he makes an argument for the reality, not
the existence, of God.) What exists -- brute materiality -- forces
itself upon us at the beginning of inquiry. Reality, on the other
hand, is what we would believe at the completion of inquiry. (The
notion of conceivability in the pragmatic maxim, we have seen,
encourages us not only to consider what exists but also to form
clear hypotheses about a reality that might be.) Adapting a notion
from differential calculus, Peirce once called reality a "limit" -- what
would be believed by a community of inquirers after inquiry had
run its course. By identifying truth with this hypothetical consensus
ad quem, Misak constructs a "pragmatic theory
of truth" that captures Peirce's streak of objectivity without
sacrificing his vivid sense of the interpretative and communal
element in science. Her account, which contains several important
subtleties, errs, however, in speaking as if objectivity requires
-- and hence that a reconstruction of Peirce's system should somehow
vindicate -- a "bivalent" logic, in which propositions
must be either true or false.

To the contrary, if we are
to borrow terms about truth values from formal logic, Peirce's
logic of inquiry would have as its mathematical complement a formal
system of more than two values, in which, for example, a third
value between true and false might accommodate the crucial no-man's-land
of propositions that are unproven, unprovable, or open to reconsideration.
(And it is no accident that Peirce developed the first matrix
notation for many-valued logic in late, unpublished notebook entries,
more than a decade before the logicians Lukasiewicz and Post independently
published similar innovations.) As Peirce put it techni[615]cally,
in keeping with one aspect of his doctrine of continuity, a triadic
logic has a third value to represent "the common limit of
'P' and 'not P'"

Peirce's overall trademark,
both technically and metaphysically, is to set his terms so that
intellectual boundaries are open to continuing revision in the
pursuit of an ever more general grasp of reality -- where "reality"
is both explicandum and criterion for the inquiring mind and,
at the same time, a general condition in which mind participates.

This supple and initially
difficult conception is illustrated at the level of the formation
of personality in Peirce's Approach to the Self,
a book of essays by Vincent Michael Colapietro. Peirce makes
the topic of the self inescapable. By building the interpretant
into the definition of a sign, he requires as a philosophical
complement a highly developed account of self-consciousness, self-criticism,
and self-control. How else are we to sift out what is merely idiosyncratic
in interpretation?

As he grew older, Peirce
incessantly invoked an ideal of "self-control." Yet
since his scattered writings on the self are often inconsistent
and overstated, his emphasis on self-control has been plausibly
read as a cry of remorse at the ruins of his private life. His
failings on the topic have seemed especially glaring when compared
with the robust and seductive portrayal of the self that suffuses
the work of William James.

Hence Colapietro's work fills
a gap of more than archival interest. If it can be shown that
Peirce had a theory of the self that explains how we retain a
personal identity while entering into a general and publicly articulable
order of nature and society -- and further how we exercise some
control over the world and ourselves through our use of signs
-- this would justify strong claims for his philosophy as a whole.

Colapietro takes Peirce a
good distance toward such a theory. He understands Peirce's semiotic
to address a central problem in the conception of human subjectivity:
the opposition between an inner, private self and a communal
self defined by its relations with others -- a tension, as Colapietro
puts it, between solitude and solidarity. If mind is defined as
operating with signs, and if the meaning of a sign is to be found
in its conceivable practical effects, it follows that a self can
be meaningful to itself only to the extent that it thinks in terms
of practices, which are, in turn, predicated upon relations with
others.

Peirce does not deny that
we have idiosyncratic feelings, thoughts, and actions; that they
are entrenched in the habits that define our individuality; and
that we must summon energy to redirect or correct them. But all
such personal struggles with habit are part of a continuum of
semiosis and, as such, of a web of sign relationships whose meaning
resides in practical bearings that go beyond us. The stage on
which human life is enacted -- including the life of the hermit-philosopher
-- is indelibly public.

Thus, whereas James'
Principles of Psychology asserted the completely personal
character of consciousness, Peirce stressed its communicability.
In an evocative portrayal of consciousness,James had written:

The only states of consciousness
that we naturally deal with are found in personal
consciousness, minds, selves, concrete particular I's and you's.
Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself; there is
no giving or bartering between them . . . . Absolute insulation,
irreducible pluralism, is the law . . . every thought being owned
. . . . The breaches among such thoughts are the most absolute
breaches in nature.

To which Peirce responded:
"Is not the direct contrary nearer the observed facts?"
That is, is not consciousness better defined by what it shares
than what it negates in its relation with others? Is not thought
itself, even the most private, really a dialogue involving signs
that have meaning only by virtue of their effects in a world of
outward relations? And if this is so, is not our capacity to enter
into more general relations through our use of signs the very
definition of human personality? On Peirce's view, a being speaking
a purely private language would have a self utterly devoid of
humanity.

In his early writings, when
he adopted somewhat polemical stances to make his philosophy accessible
to a broader readership, Peirce was wont to cast his communal
insights in opposition to the logical individualism underlying
English nominalism; at later times he railed against the crass
individualism of the Gilded Age. In such moods he sometimes denied
the self altogether. Colapietro's service is to glean the best
from Peirce's writings on the self, supplemented by his mature
concepts of indi[617]viduality, continuity, organism, substance,
and mind, and to suggest that a fully elaborated Peircean account
would subsume a doctrine of individual personality in a larger
perspective. Colapietro also joins Peirce himself, Walker Percy,
and others in believing that a philosophical psychology along
Peircean lines would avoid confusions in psychology and brain
science deriving from overly rigid subject-object and mind-body
dichotomies.

Colapietro's reconstruction,
however, stops short of the technical virtuosity that makes Peirce
compelling in other fields. Colapietro is aware that Peirce's
system provides the raw material for a still more precise treatment:
The modalities of the interpretant include terms to describe the
formation and reshaping of habits. Unfortunately, Peirce waited
until too late in life to undertake the demanding task of refashioning
his terms to account for "self-control" at the level
of the sign-interpretant. To supply this gap would complete his
project.

For it is integral to Peirce's
view that the more general our grasp of reality becomes,the more
precise and ramified will be our explanations. Far from submerging
all distinctions in the Oneness of the All, his concept of continuity
would have us proceed from a core of received, often fruitfully
vague ideas to an ever more differentiated picture. Each new discovery
leads to others. Each new concept is open to further elaboration.
It is through the purposeful embrace of the public and communal
character of semiosis that the self finds its ultimate meaning.

Does this vision, congenial
to science, extend beyond the laboratory? Do the compact conceptions
of Peirce's philosophy have the broader applicability he intended?

For the crucial core of Peirce's
later philosophy -- the theorizing that proceeds from the continuous
sign relationship -- the range of his relevance cannot be in doubt.
Once we accept Wittgenstein's verdict that "all thinking
is essentially operating with signs," it follows that theorizing
about the power, presuppositions,
and limits of semiosis has
by definition a universal subject matter. It must apply to anything
and everything that may occur to consciousness. Thus, had our
discussion centered on the current scholarship that treats Peirce's
significance for the arts, morals, religion, linguistics, anthropology,
evolutionary biology, cognitive
science, cinematography, information
theory, or quantum physics, the same organizing concepts -- semiosis,
continuity, pragmatic meaning, modalities of signs, reality --
would have come into play.

As a result, three tendencies
in twentieth-century philosophy that have also claimed broad applicability
require Peirce's perspective for their own completion. The linguistic
turn that has dominated the
English-speaking world is a subspecies of the semiotic approach
that Peirce took. The phenomenological
movement popular on the Continent
is likewise insufficiently self-critical without a phenomenology
of signs, the medium in which
thought itself takes place
(and Husserl's late metaphysical attempt in this direction in
fact took a triadic, albeit ego-centered, form). The scientific
trend in philosophy, insofar as it excludes the interpreting mind
from its working definition of reality, is subsumed and re-oriented
in Peirce, who locates its abstractions in a more capacious yet
no less exacting context. (Abner Shimony, the noted practitioner
and philosopher of quantum physics, concludes the section on complex
systems of his two-volume Search for a Naturalistic Worldview
with this self-effacing credo: "It is honorable
to be an epigone of Peirce.")

Admittedly, it seems extravagant
to suggest that a blackballed, debt-ridden, small-brained, left-handed,
pain-wracked, opium-eating, skirt-chasing, nineteenth-century
recluse, by the simple device of including the sign-interpretant
in the formal definition of the sign and by a life-long struggle
to draw out the implications of this idea, may still have more
to teach us than the contemporary discussions we have learned
to regard as momentous.

But consider: From his first
paper on the subject in 1867, Peirce returned repeatedly to the
continuous sign relationship. For the last three decades of his
life, Peirce worked in increasing isolation, writing prodigiously,
publishing only a portion -- buzzing furiously, as he put it,
like a wasp in a bottle. His interests and his situation reinforced
each other. He attended more and more to phenomena of common experience
that could be examined without the benefit of colleagues or scientific
instruments. Though the growth of the modern university has done
great things for topics
that can be cast into specialized
departments, there is no reason to suppose that anyone in [618]
the past century would have duplicated, let alone superseded,
Peirce's concentration on a few ineluctable and inter-related
concepts. The only excuse for not taking him seriously is a skeptical
dogmatism that would have us deny (on a priori grounds?) that
some ideas may be more fundamental than others.

Peirce's chosen idioms were
doubly demanding: on the one hand, metaphysics, in which contributions
are judged against a tradition of 2,400 years; on the other, symbolic
logic, then in its infancy, of which he was a pioneer in its algebraic,
quantificational, and topological forms. He insisted that each
must reflect the other. How many writers of the past century have
had Peirce's aptitude for both prongs of this bilingual enterprise,
or have matched his unrelenting fecundity in concurrent innovation
in them into his seventies?

Now, eighty years after his
death, Peirce has himself become a topic for specialized inquiry.
New tools for scholarship and for pedagogy are giving him a delayed
afterlife. The consensus ad quem is that we shall
have to take him more fully into account. The wasp is out of the
bottle. His sting remains to be felt.

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